Beauty is commonly defined as a characteristic present in a person, place, object or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction to the mind or to the eyes, arising from sensory manifestations such as a shape, color, personality, sound, design or rhythm. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology and culture. Beauty, as a cultural creation, is also extremely commercialized.
In a subjective sense, beauty is determined by characteristics that are perceived in such a way as to provide the “viewer” a feeling of attraction or a sense of well-being. A person, scene, or thing may be perceived as beautiful or ugly by different individuals. In the subjective sense, “beauty exists in the eye of the beholder.”
Objective beauty is more difficult to define. Advances in mathematics marked attempts to define beauty in theoretical terms. Symmetry in architecture and objects proportioned according to the golden ratio seemed more attractive. Modern research also suggests that people whose facial features are symmetric and proportioned according the golden ratio are more attractive than those whose faces are not. There is evidence that a preference for beautiful faces emerges early in child development, and that the standards of attractiveness are similar across different cultures.
A strong indicator of physical beauty is “averageness.” When images of human faces are averaged together to form a composite image, they become progressively closer to the “ideal” image and are perceived as more attractive. This was first noticed in 1883, when Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, overlaid photographic composite images of the faces of vegetarians and criminals to see if there was a typical facial appearance for each. When doing this, he noticed that the composite images were more attractive compared to any of the individual images. Researchers have replicated the result under more controlled conditions and found that the computer generated, mathematical average of a series of faces is rated more favorably than individual faces.
Against this background, embodiments of the present invention utilize mathematical models of idealized regions of the body to provide an objective measure of beauty of those regions and of the body as a whole and an objective comparison of an individual's beauty measures to known individuals or groups of individuals.